1. Field
The present disclosure is directed to a structural link or measuring device between two randomly positioned surfaces. The link is especially useful in securing new components into pre-existing spaces having widely varying shapes and contours, such as securing battery packs in electric vehicles, and will be described in connection with such utility. The connector may also be used as a measuring device for fabricating more customized connecting hardware.
2. Description of Related Art
As people have become more aware of the scarcity of limited natural resources, significant resources have been directed at reusing or recycling existing materials and infrastructure. This trend is most clearly evidenced in the automobile industry, as federal and state mandates have required cars and trucks to become more efficient. In theory, electric cars have strong advantages over gasoline cars. Pure electric cars have no emissions, and the electricity they use can come from a variety of sources. They have few moving parts and require little maintenance. For the same reason, they do not break down often and are more reliable than gasoline cars. Most of all, they are much more energy efficient than gasoline cars.
Notwithstanding the differences in efficiency, gasoline cars continue to dominate the passenger car and light truck market, and virtually every vehicle on the road today is powered by a gasoline or diesel engine. To improve consumption, and reduce emissions, car makers have, among other things, modified gasoline engines to burn cleaner, unleaded gasoline; installed catalytic converters and developed sophisticated exhaust control systems. Famously, some manufacturers are beginning to offer new vehicles with an electric motor or combination of electric and backup gasoline motors. These new electric vehicles are heavily subsidized, and remain quite costly for most consumers. Few dispute that an electric car, if economically viable and widely accepted, would greatly reduce air pollution in major cities, decrease carbon emissions, and lessen reliance on oil imported from unstable areas.
Many parts of a gasoline car and an electric car are essentially identical. Electric motors and drive trains have been engineered and created having a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and capabilities, but are rarely used to replace existing gasoline or diesel motors in existing vehicles or existing car designs. Part of the problem in converting a gasoline driven vehicle into an electrically driven vehicle is coupling the new motor to the drive train of the existing gasoline driven vehicle. Substantial modification may need to be made to secure the new motor in the old vehicle. Some attempts at converting gasoline vehicles to electric vehicles, such as that shown in US 2009/0229895, even use a “push” trailer that may be coupled to the gasoline vehicle frame to provide the electrically driven motive force to the vehicle. Moreover, battery and electric technology is changing much faster than traditional mechanical technology. As the size and shape of components for electric vehicles rapidly change, a need exists to securely install a new component in a space designed for accommodating an older version of a component.
Current methods of securing a conversion component into a variably shaped space are extremely cumbersome. The ideal location for the replacement component must be determined and distances from component surfaces to the surface of the compartment in which the component is to be installed must be painstakingly calculated. Usually, direct connections from a stable surface to the component are unavailable and mounting hardware must be custom designed with one, and possibly multiple, angled portions in order to secure the replacement component into the space available. Expensive three dimensional modeling software may be employed, but still may not exactly resemble the actual physical articles involved, leading to complications in installing hardware in the physical world.
One of the most difficult problems in installing electric-drive components into a car that has had all of its gas-burning components removed will be in converting a car's body space that had formerly contained a gas tank to now house and secure a battery pack. The body sheet metal creating newly available space will likely be extremely irregular, not having been created to accommodate anything other than the former gas tank. A need accordingly exists for a more efficient method and apparatus of securing a conversion or replacement component having some shape into an existing space that has an irregular shape. A need further exists for a more efficient system and method for measuring or modeling an effective support hardware structure in situ for securing a component in an irregular space.